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Naomi Tatton Park Summer crop
A diagnosis of bronchiectasis provided Naomi with an explanation for continuing tiredness. She has since discovered that gardening is an activity that can continued to be enjoyed to the full. She shares her story.

Beyond an ongoing tiredness, which a blood test I’d had couldn’t find any reason for, I felt fit and healthy. Then, at the start of 2023 and out of the blue, on the way from dropping my grandchildren at school, I found myself coughing blood.

After a scary couple of weeks, lung cancer was ruled out, I was diagnosed as having bronchiectasis. It’s a ‘long term condition affecting the airway tubes (bronchi and bronchioles). The airway tubes have become damaged and widened due to inflammation.’ It’s a condition that doesn’t require ongoing medication, but does require attentive management to clear the lungs of mucus and to keep them clear, via breathing techniques, immediate antibiotics if an infection is suspected, and regular monitoring.

For some people tiredness is one of the effects of the condition – though it is not known why. The advice on this aspect is to ‘pace yourself, look after your body, manage your bronchiectasis and treat flare ups quickly.’

Having worked most of my life in an office, at the end of the pandemic and before my diagnosis, I made a career change. Over the last couple of years I’ve taken courses leading to the RHS Level 2 Diploma in the Principles and Practices of Horticulture. Having this in my hand, I’ve now enrolled for a Level 2 Garden Design programme.

Naomi community space flytipping web
A community space previously used for flytipping
Naomi community space Summer 23 web
A community space transformed with planted containers

This last is because I’ve recently moved to an urban house. I now have a small back and front urban garden. Each one is a neglected patch of bare earth/scrubby ‘lawn’. I also volunteer at the local primary school gardening club, and co-ordinate a community garden on our street (see photos above), so I’m doing a fair bit of gardening day to day!

Re-thinking gardening post diagnosis

Having a diagnosis that goes part-way to explaining my tiredness (the other part is childcare, aging, and being a runner) initially found me:

  • thinking more carefully about what I want from my own garden as I design it from scratch
  • wondering whether I would have to change anything I did with the school and community gardens to continue to make a meaningful contribution without compromising my wellbeing
  • practicing giving up telling myself not to be a wimp - there is a reason for my tiredness. (I am not at all good at allowing myself to feel tired!)

With more research and what I’ve found in the year since my diagnosis is that gardening, far from being an activity to retreat from, is an activity to continue to enjoy to the full. It brings all the benefits that being outdoors in nature is known to bring in terms of mental health and physical wellbeing.

Gardening, far from being an activity to retreat from, is an activity to continue to enjoy to the full.

Naomi

Although bronchiectasis is a chronic, progressive condition with no cure, the advice on exercise is clear: ‘Any form of exercise that makes you a little breathless, such as walking and swimming is extremely beneficial for people with bronchiectasis. It may help you to clear your chest and will improve your overall fitness. Staying or getting fit will help you build resistance to infections.’

With the value of gardening going without saying, I am not planning to change the way I work with the school and community gardens. For my own garden, I am intending to design a Japanese style front and back. Japanese gardens are carefully designed ‘arrangements of rocks, water features, moss, pruned trees and bushes, and use gravel or sand that is raked to represent ripples in water.’

I have an image of myself starting each day slowly and meditatively. I would be raking the gravel – combing exercise with mindfulness – plucking individual fallen leaves from the ground, pruning with tiny Niwaki shears and feeling refreshed, not tired. Whether this image will come to pass in the bustle of living in urban London, and alongside all my other commitments, I don’t know. But I’m hanging on to it for now.

Perhaps the Zen-ness of the garden will develop my practice of allowing myself to pace myself and to learn that feeling tired is not being a wimp.

Naomi

Perhaps the Zen-ness of the garden will develop my practice of allowing myself to pace myself and to learn that feeling tired is not being a wimp. Perhaps it will support me in managing living with bronchiectasis as the condition progresses and as I age. Yes, I think it will.

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